Functional Reactive Applications

I want to take a step back from React JS, FLUX and cursors for a minute. There is a concept that has always intrigued me, but I have never quite understood it in the context of creating an application. The concept is Functional Reactive Programming. There are quite a few articles on the subject, but none of them really explains this concept in the context of building an application.

You have probably heard of BaconJS and RxJS, but none of them welcomes application development for programmers who do not already deeply understand the concepts. To me BaconJS seems like a stream wrapper for jQuery when reading the documentation. It does not introduce any application state concepts at all. RxJS feels much like the immutable-js project by Facebook. It is a huge API that is about handling data, not about creating applications. I am not saying that is a bad thing, I just feel that something is missing.

There is a really great project called CycleJS and an article explaining the reasoning behind it. It is a different way of thinking about application development. An exciting one, but difficult to grasp. I had to read the article a couple of times and go through some examples before it started to dawn on me, so I thought I would have a go at it. Give my take on how and why you would want to use Functional Reactive Programming to build your applications.

Get a grip on the terms

When I say Functional Reactive Programming I am not referring to the academic definition of it. I do not really care for discussions on academic aspects, as it is the practice that is important. So in my opinion when developers think Functional Reactive Programming they think Observables and being able to use functional concepts like Map, Reduce, Filter etc. on them. Let us break that down.

Functional

Functional programming basically means using functions. In JavaScript this translates to passing a function as an argument to operate on some input, and give an output. An example of this would be:

We pass a function as an argument to operate on the array input and the output is a new array only containing the items that has a thruthy value on the property isAwesome. The important thing to notice here is that there is nothing outside the isAwesomeFilter function affecting its insides. That is what we call a pure function and that is essential to Functional Programming. An unpure function would be:

There are two reason for this being a bad thing. First of all the function might not always do what you expect. In this simple example the awesomeArray would of course always look the same, but in larger applications something else could access awesomeArray and change it. That would cause the forEach loop to create different results. This is called side effects.

Second this piece of code is harder to test. If you wanted to test the function passed to forEach you would also have to control the outer array, but in the first example you can easily test the isAwesomeFilter function by just running it with different inputs.

Reactive

It is hard to explain the benefits of Reactive programming. Looking at examples you often think “cool, can I do that?”, more than “ah, that will keep me sane developing my application”. But let me give it a try here, starting with some abstract thoughts and then going into more practicalities throughout the article. I think Reactive Programming can most easily be explained as reacting to a change, instead of being told about a change. Simply:

You had to change your existing code and it now has a side effect, calling moduleB. Your tests might also be broken because of this

With a reactive pattern we would not require module B in module A, we would do the exact opposite, require module A in module B. This makes more sense because we do not really want to touch module A. When module A has done its job we react to it in module B and run the code there.

You did not have to change existing code or tests and there is no side effect in module A

So what is this article about?

As mentioned I was very inspired by the CycleJS project. It is a very exciting new take on application development, but in its current form it is quite verbose and it is hard to grasp the concepts. It uses RxJS, which requires heavy investment from someone who has not done reactive programming before. So I decided to create a similar project where it does not matter what FRP library you use. The library is called R and just provides a view concept that you can inject observables into and out comes DOM, using the virtual-dom project. This is much inspired by React JS itself.

But of course, you need more than a “view” to build an application, so I will introduce these examples as a typical FLUX pattern. Store, Component and Actions.

The Store layer is where you produce and export the state of your application

The Component layer is where you describe your UI. The returned value from a component is an observable that produces virtual DOM trees

The Actions layer is where you define what your components, or anything else, can do to change the state of your application. It being events from a click, changes in an input, route change, ajax response etc. This is where state changes start

So to give you an analogy for the data flow, think conveyor belts. Imagine Stores and Actions injected into your components as conveyor belts. The store conveyor belt goes in the direction of the component and the action conveyor belt goes in the opposite direction. When a component places a new box with some content on an action conveyor belt it is carried into the store. Inside the store there are multiple stations using the content of a box to create a new box, carrying it a long to the next station until it reaches the end of the conveyor belt, as state in your components. This is the “one way flow” we know from FLUX, but it is FRP all the way through:

The API

I have chosen to show the examples using BaconJS as I believe it to be easier to understand. Beware that BaconJS does not depend on jQuery, though it focuses heavily on its compatability with it! But now, let us get into some code:

When rendering an application with R you can actually inject whatever you want into your components. Maybe you want to think observables, streams or maybe intents. You choose the terms that makes sense to you and the FRP library you are using. The callback returns the initial virtual DOM tree that will be applied to the body of the document.

So creating an action is pretty much just about defining them. The important part about actions is that you have to be able to push values on to them. In BaconJS those are called Bus, in RxJS you have BehaviorSubject.

So now we see FRP in action. Whenever the changeTitle action has a new “box on its conveyor belt” it will go through the “map station”. This “station” opens up the box, finds an event and based on it being an ENTER press or not, it pushes a new box on to the new “title conveyor belt”, which is an observable. The content of the box is either an empty string or the value of the event target.

We also give the title observable an initial value so that the component has a value to work with when it is rendered.

First of all we import the Component, Hook and also DOM from R. The reason we import DOM is to allow JSX syntax. We define a component by passing a function. This function has two arguments. The first argument, props, are any properties passed to the component from an other component. This is a familiar concept from React JS. The second argument are all the observables injected into Render. I like to use the common term observables for them, but depending on the FRP-library you use, something else might give more sense. In this example the observables are the actions and the observables exposed by the store.

The component has to return an observable (conveyor belt) that moves “boxes” containing DOM representations. It does that by attaching “store conveyor belts” to its own “map station”. So changes to state goes into the “map station”, and out comes a new DOM representation. In this case we only attach a single observable, but we will see later how we can attach multiple observables.

Instead of onKeyup you know from React JS, virtual-dom uses ev-keyup. It works the same way. To make it easier to hook on to observables R exposes a Hook function. This function takes the observable as the first argument and the name of the method that will be called to push values to it. With BaconJS that is push, but with RxJS it would be onNext. You can also pass additional arguments, these are typically values you want to bind to the callback.

Summarizing our app

Okay, so this was of course a very simple application. Its only functionality is emptying the input when hitting enter. Its hard to see benefits with such a simple example, but let me point out:

The component is dumb and stateless. It has no logic for changing state. It only pushes changes to the actions and produces a new DOM representation when receiving changes from the store

The component does not depend on observables, they are injected into the components when rendered

The actions knows nothing about the stores, they just expose a set of interactions in your application and stores can hook on to those to produce state

Let us look at more complex state handling to see how easily we can scale the application.

Creating mutations

You need to mutate the state of your application. With Functional Reactive Programming you have to think about this differently. For example a list of titles can be mutated in many different ways, it being adding a title, removing a title etc. Traditionally you would think the list of titles as an array, but in the world of FRP it is more than that. If we think about our title used in the input above, the title is an observable based on events pushed to the changeTitle action. If we think about our list, it will be an observable based on an array with mutation observables hooked on to it. Let me explain with code:

store.js

import actions from './actions.js';
var title = actions.changeTitle
// Instead of using keyup on the input we use keydown and
// wait on next tick to get the value of the input
.throttle(0)
.map(function (event) {
return event.keyCode === 13 ? '' : event.target.value;
})
.startWith('');
// We create an observable for all new titles
var newTitle = actions.changeTitle
// We only want to pass a long events if we press
// ENTER and there actually is a value in the input
.filter(function (event) {
return event.keyCode === 13 && !!event.target.value;
})
// We return the input value
.map(function (event) {
return event.target.value;
});
// We create an observable that produces functions
// that will add a title to the titles array
var addTitle = newTitle
// For every new title we create a mutation function. The
// function will receieve existing titles, mutates it and
// returns it
.map(function (event) {
return function (titles) {
titles.push(event.target.value);
return titles;
};
});
// Titles is an observable based on mutations
var titles = addTitle
// Scan is like "reduce". We start out with an empty titles array,
// and every time a new mutation arrives from "addTitle",
// we run that mutation passing in the current titles array. What differs is
// that the returned value from the mutation will become the new titles
// value, which is used on next arrival of "addTitle"
.scan([], function (titles, addTitleMutation) {
return addTitleMutation(titles);
});
module.exports = {
title: title,
titles: titles
};

Okay, so things look a bit crazy at first sight, but please hang on. It does feel weird not explicitly defining an array of titles, but understanding why this is, is what I believe to be the big “aha” moment. So let us work our way to that moment.

First of all we need an observable that can produce an array of titles, but we also need to hook in multiple observables that will do different mutations to the array. This is a great job for scan (reduce). Scan is a method that takes an initial value, our array, and a function that will run whenever the observables that is hooked on to it passes in a new value. So what we do in this example is hooking on an observable called addTitle that will pass functions which our scan reacts to. When an addTitleMutation is received it will be run and the current array of titles is passed. The returned value from the function, which is the array of titles, will now become the current value of scan and it will now become the value of the titles observable.

So why is this better? Well, if you think about how you would solve this with traditional progamming style you would probably dive into our existing title code, create the array as a side effect making all of this harder to test. If you look closely at our functions they are completely pure and very easy to test. A sidenote here is that it is easier to handle immutable data structures also, as the array returned from our mutation function could have been a completely new array.

Make it testable

Though the functions we created are pure, they are not really testable yet. We have to put them into their own module, making them exposed for testing purposes. This also cleans up the store code:

Now you start to see how clean and decoupled our code becomes. You can easily reuse existing functions and they are very easy to test. You also see how generic they actually are. You could easily rename these functions, maybe make factories out of them, reusing them across all your observables.

BaconJS has a method called combineTempate(). This method takes an object with keys and values, where the values are observables. I think the example is self explainatory :-) It is also worth mentioning that the Component in r-js uses requestAnimationFrame. So if there are multiple observable changes on the same tick, it will only render once on the next animation frame.

Adding more mutations

You might be eager to check out how we would handle ajax, ajax errors and states like isSaving. Hang on, we will check that very soon. But let us first create a new mutation that removes a clicked title from the titles array.

Thats it! The new code did not mess around with some defined array anywhere. It just creates a mutation that we hook on to our titles observable which runs the mutations. If we named our new function “removeByIndex” it is generic enough to be used anywhere. In fact we could make all our helpers completely generic. Now we see DRY code taken to a whole new level.

Ajax

You can not create an application without pushing some data to the server and receiving it. So let me show you how to solve this with Functional Reactive Programming. We are going to push new titles to the server, removing it if an error occurs and create a new observable for isSaving. I will not be writing the helper functions, just to show you how obvious and clear the code becomes, but maybe you want to try implement them yourself?

Summary

I hope this has peeked your interest and that I managed to explain the concepts in a way that makes sense when building applications. “R” is not a production ready library, it was built to write this article and try to make Functional Reactive Programming more approachable for building applications. I highly recommend taking a look at CycleJS, though it is more a framework than just a FRP-view. So please give me some feedback on R and play around with the demo included in the repo. It would be great to keep working on this library.